#3 Marketing automation and email marketing - This is also a perennial feature in our top five and it's no surprise since, like content marketing, it's effective for both B2C and B2B marketing. While some more mature organizations will make improvements through use of AI, other less mature businesses will benefit from improving the relevance and timing of their emails through using rules-based automation and personalisation.
In order for marketers to succeed in using micro-moments, they should understand the basic practices of each one. Let’s take for instance the “I-want-to-go-moments”. Brick and mortar stores can take advantage of such a moment by capitalizing on “near me” searches, which have grown 2X between 2016 and 2017 according to Google. This requires storefronts to optimize their locations on their websites or apps. Furthermore, they can go even beyond that by creating ads for their store’s location or popular products to improve their visibility in search engines and reach their customers at the appropriate time.

The development of digital marketing, during the 1990s and 2000s, changed the way brands and businesses use technology for marketing.[4] As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life,[5] and as people increasingly use digital devices instead of visiting physical shops,[6][7] digital marketing campaigns have become prevalent, employing combinations of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing,[8] e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, display advertising, e–books, and optical disks and games have become commonplace. Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as television, mobile phones (SMS and MMS), callback, and on-hold mobile ring tones.[9] The extension to non-Internet channels differentiates digital marketing from online marketing.

Another trend here is the adoption of dashboard reporting and analysis systems. At Smart Insights, we have adopted Google’s Data Studio (since it came out of Beta) for our monthly and weekly trading reports alongside the Google Sheets Add-In for the Google Analytics API, which we use for pulling the data through for our RACE digital marketing dashboard.
Paid media is a bit self-explanatory in what its name suggests -- and refers to any vehicle or channel that you spend money on to catch the attention of your buyer personas. This includes things like Google AdWords, paid social media posts, native advertising (like sponsored posts on other websites), and any other medium for which you directly pay in exchange for visibility.
Your strategy document will be very individual to your business, which is why it's almost impossible for us to create a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy template. Remember, the purpose of your strategy document is to map out the actions you're going to take to achieve your goal over a period of time -- as long as it communicates that, then you've nailed the basics of creating a digital strategy.
Smart companies seeking that elusive competitive advantage online see the greatest successes with a strategy that employs optimization best practices. SEO Plus takes into consideration search engines, social network and online news media preferences while catering to your customers’ needs. Increase your online visibility and put your brand in front of the right audience, on the right channel, at the right point in their purchasing journey with our SEO services.
For example, to implement PPC using Google AdWords, you'll bid against other companies in your industry to appear at the top of Google's search results for keywords associated with your business. Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword, this can be reasonably affordable, or extremely expensive, which is why it's a good idea to focus building your organic reach, too.
Understanding Mobiles: Understanding mobile devices is a significant aspect of digital marketing because smartphones and tablets are now responsible for 64% of the time US consumers are online (Whiteside, 2016).[43] Apps provide a big opportunity as well as challenge for the marketers because firstly the app needs to be downloaded and secondly the person needs to actually use it. This may be difficult as ‘half the time spent on smartphone apps occurs on the individuals single most used app, and almost 85% of their time on the top four rated apps’ (Whiteside, 2016).[43] Mobile advertising can assist in achieving a variety of commercial objectives and it is effective due to taking over the entire screen, and voice or status is likely to be considered highly; although the message must not be seen or thought of as intrusive (Whiteside, 2016).[43] Disadvantages of digital media used on mobile devices also include limited creative capabilities, and reach. Although there are many positive aspects including the users entitlement to select product information, digital media creating a flexible message platform and there is potential for direct selling (Belch & Belch, 2012).[45]
Brand24 - Brand24 is simple online monitoring application. Use Brand24 to identify and analyze online conversations about their brands, products, and competitors. Brand24 provides a reliable, easy to use, and affordable solution that allows you to both track and engage online conversations relevant to your business. They also offer an influencer score insight to help you identify people with the most social influence.
Systems such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics are relatively static in terms of reports and functionality. For me, the main trend here is using softer measures to get customer feedback. For example, I’ve been taking a look at some really interesting case studies from Vision Critical (Disclosure: A Content Marketing Partner of Smart Insights) which show how savvy brands are using customer communities to feed back.

For example, say you’re looking for kitchen decoration inspiration and an image attracts your attention. You click on a thumbnail result to get to the “Detail View.” The overall décor is great, but you’re particularly interested in that nice-looking chandelier. Wouldn’t you love to know where you can get one just like it? With Bing Visual Search, now you can.

In the 2000s, with more and more Internet users and the birth of iPhone, customers started searching products and making decisions about their needs online first, instead of consulting a salesperson, which created a new problem for the marketing department of a company. In addition, a survey in 2000 in the United Kingdom found that most retailers had not registered their own domain address.[14] These problems made marketers find the digital ways for market development.
Quite simply, earned media refers to the exposure you've earned through word-of-mouth. Whether that's content you've distributed on other websites (e.g., guest posts), PR work you've been doing, or the customer experience you've delivered, earned media is the recognition you receive as a result. You can earn media by getting press mentions, positive reviews, and by other people sharing your content on social media, for instance.
Delta Air Lines is a prolific user of social media, specifically on its Twitter handle. The brand uses this account to engage potential passengers in a variety of ways that are both timely and emotionally stimulating. Last month, in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the company began sharing personal stories from Delta employees directly through the company's Twitter feed. Here's the beginning of one story's thread, below.
A content marketer, for example, can create a series of blog posts that serve to generate leads from a new ebook the business recently created. The company's social media marketer might then help promote these blog posts through paid and organic posts on the business's social media accounts. Perhaps the email marketer creates an email campaign to send those who download the ebook more information on the company. We'll talk more about these specific digital marketers in a minute.

The development of digital marketing, during the 1990s and 2000s, changed the way brands and businesses use technology for marketing.[4] As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life,[5] and as people increasingly use digital devices instead of visiting physical shops,[6][7] digital marketing campaigns have become prevalent, employing combinations of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing,[8] e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, display advertising, e–books, and optical disks and games have become commonplace. Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as television, mobile phones (SMS and MMS), callback, and on-hold mobile ring tones.[9] The extension to non-Internet channels differentiates digital marketing from online marketing.

Systems to gather unstructured feedback from customers are also increasing in popularity with larger brands. This case study from Vision Critical gives an example of how How Prudential Singapore accelerates product growth with customer insights. The company launched the PRU for You (PFY) community in July 2016 to allow greater engagement with customers and to give them a voice in developing new products and services. PFY has 4,500 members: 88% are customers and 12% are agents.

Check out our professionally-written Digital Marketing Plan Template that lets you shares the details of all the planning for your digital marketing campaigns. Using this plan template in Word, you can present details such as your company overview, marketing strategies, products & services, and so on. Download this impressive plan template now so that you can view and edit it on various devices.
In-game advertising - In-Game advertising is defined as "inclusion of products or brands within a digital game."[50] The game allows brands or products to place ads within their game, either in a subtle manner or in the form of an advertisement banner. There are many factors that exist in whether brands are successful in their advertising of their brand/product, these being: Type of game, technical platform, 3-D and 4-D technology, game genre, congruity of brand and game, prominence of advertising within the game. Individual factors consist of attitudes towards placement advertisements, game involvement, product involvement, flow or entertainment. The attitude towards the advertising also takes into account not only the message shown but also the attitude towards the game. Dependent of how enjoyable the game is will determine how the brand is perceived, meaning if the game isn't very enjoyable the consumer may subconsciously have a negative attitude towards the brand/product being advertised. In terms of Integrated Marketing Communication "integration of advertising in digital games into the general advertising, communication, and marketing strategy of the firm"[50] is an important as it results in a more clarity about the brand/product and creates a larger overall effect.
We are living in the age of data abundance where people engage with brands over several channels, they consume content in an unstructured manner and do a lot of homework before making a buying decision. Predictive marketing is taking all these unstructured interactions, looking at existing positive data patterns and anticipating results accordingly.
“Most search-driven manual advertising campaigns (even those performed with professional tools) take into account three or four targets: the keyword, time of day, and location. Such tools like programmatic demand-side platforms can use hundreds of targeting signals to individualize the advertisement and even target according to lifestyle or behavior habits when integrated with customer data platforms.”
On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers onto their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.
Understanding the path from discovery to conversion of your customers is key in determining what changes you can make to convert more customers. Our data-driven approach will help us determine which metrics are most important and what actions we can take to help you convert more customers. Additionally, in order to measure your marketing activities against overarching business goals you must analyze the wealth of data at your fingertips. This data will help you identify successes or inefficiencies, as well as drive future content and planning for website improvements. Our SmartCharts solution helps you not only see a full, real-time picture of your data, but our data analysis team will serve you actionable insights every month to keep those numbers going up and to the right.
Prioritizing clicks refers to display click ads, although advantageous by being ‘simple, fast and inexpensive’ rates for display ads in 2016 is only 0.10 percent in the United States. This means one in a thousand click ads are relevant therefore having little effect. This displays that marketing companies should not just use click ads to evaluate the effectiveness of display advertisements (Whiteside, 2016).[43]
That's exactly how the three can work together to help you meet your goal. Of course, it's not compulsory to use all three. If your owned and earned media are both successful, you might not need to invest in paid. It's all about evaluating the best solution to meet your goal, and then incorporating the channels that work best for your business into your digital marketing strategy.

Businesses should also focus their outreach efforts on using voice engine optimization. Marketers must use a more natural language SEO to create content accordingly. This requires them to think what their target audience may use in their voice queries as well as focus on long-tail keywords because searchers are likely to be more specific when asking a question. For instance, in one question, a shopper may request information about time, price, location and other details which sound heavy for written search queries.

As one size doesn’t fit all and customers want more relevancy, the need for a personalized approach in marketing is becoming more critical than ever. Although delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time is tricky, it will add a big value to your content marketing strategy because it plays a major role in boosting your users engagement rates.
Google have been prioritizing rich ‘visual search’ snippets across all their platforms and devices, which allow visitors to get all the information they are looking a lot faster and help them decide on the right website to click through, right from the top results. Based on a study conducted by Path Interactive, among people aged between 13 and 18, 40% of them are going to get what they need through rich snippets.
Marketers are therefore looking for consolidated tools and out of the box campaigns, which can be deployed with few clicks. A templated campaign can include a couple of landing pages, ready forms, data tracking and workflow with all its messages, created based on campaign goals, such as a paid ad campaign. With this capability, marketers can cut down time, decrease cost and focus on improving their content versus doing redundant work.

Customer preferences continue to change when it comes to email marketing, and it’s important to keep up. Data analytics along with advanced email automation platforms have resulted in big strides in the personalized email sphere. Anyone who isn’t using these email marketing tools to create unique and super personalized emails in 2020 may get left by the wayside.

Be able to reach all of the possible customers when it comes to marketing your restaurant by using our Restaurant Digital Marketing Plan template. Choose from the many different options you have with digital marketing starting from search engine optimization down to social media marketing. Modify the template to fit your purpose by opening this file in any of the multiple file formats.
A lot of really awesome tools on this list. A few that I wasn't aware of that I can now add to my arsenal. I've come across a really great tool for anyone that uses a lot of different channels for paid marketing, called Funnel (funnel.io). It eliminates all the tedious time that it takes to aggregate all of your spending data. They currently support integration with more than 400 advertising sources and you can either use their built-in dashboards for analysis or export to a data warehouse, BI tool, or even Google. It's an amazing time saver for anyone who has ever spent an insane amount of time gathering data that seems to be outdated even by the time you've gotten it all together. Might make a nice addition to the list!